The Worst Thing I Ever Did
Part II
This is a true story that happened when I was nineteen. Part two of three.
I’ve spent the last sixteen years trying to forget this time of my life. You can run from your past, but that’s not how I want to live.
“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
― Aleksander Solzhenitsyn , Archipiélago Gulag I
If you haven’t read part one, you can find it here:
In my youth, I believed that being a criminal was cool.
I graduated high school in 2008 with a sky-high 1.8 GPA. I skipped school a lot, and when I was there, I didn’t try very hard. I tried not to try. I had no desire to go to college.
After high school, I got a job through a temp agency working in a warehouse, picking orders for prison commissaries. It was miserable. I had a number used to track my productivity instead of my name. I was number 269. Pretty ironic, considering who our customers were. I thought about getting this number tattooed on my arm as a reminder to never work a job like this again.
The one nice part about this job was I’d usually be done before noon on Fridays. One Friday, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize. It was my friend Travis. He was free after spending our entire senior year in County jail for multiple offenses. First, for robbing a kid at knifepoint. Then, getting caught with roughly 100 ecstasy pills by police.
I was with him that night. He ran first and got caught. I got away. He went to jail. I went home. His life changed forever. Mine stayed pretty much the same.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but losing the 100 pills would cost both of us dearly and indirectly lead to my car getting burned down.
I met him at his family’s low-income apartment that afternoon. It was a glorious summer day. Not too hot, light breeze. The kind of day you want to last forever, but you blink and it’s gone.
I had worked a full week, and now I was free. Not a care in the world.
I pull up in my “new” ‘98 Champagne Infiniti I30. I see Travis sitting on the patio with his hand held up to his mouth in a fist, saying,
“Oooh daamn!” Acknowledging my new car.
I hop out.
“Look at you!” He says.
“How’s your asshole?” I say.
He shakes his head and smiles.
He tells me about his time in county jail. How terrible it was. How bummed out he is that he missed our senior year.
We sit on the porch and smoke a blunt, listening to My Life by The Game, featuring Lil Wayne. An absolute banger—the anthem of the summer for us.
We make plans to start a business.
A couple weeks later, I go to meet Travis at a different apartment, down the street from his family’s place. He’s on house arrest and living with his older sister.
It’s getting late, maybe nine or ten o'clock.
“You ready, brother?” He asks me.
“You know it.”
“We’re gonna take over the west side,” he says.
We each have $100. We decide to pool our money together, buy a half-ounce of weed, and start our business as partners. Fifty-fifty.
We shake up.
The next day, we buy the half-ounce. We each get a quarter-ounce (quad) to sell.
We turn them around in a day or two and buy another half-ounce. The half-ounce costs us about $160, and we can each sell our quarter for $100 if we don’t smoke too much of it. We do this a few times, and pretty soon we’re buying an ounce, and we each have our own half-ounce.
We keep doing this and leveling up until we're buying half pounds. Business was good.
It was a crazy carefree time for us. For me, at least. He was on house arrest, and was supposed to be at work on weekdays. I’m not sure how he managed to never go to work. But he did. Week after week.
Every day was a new adventure. I’d wake up in the morning, pick up Travis, roll a blunt, and ride around in my Infiniti with the blacked-out windows playing music. We sold weed and did whatever we wanted. We’d walk around with thousands in cash on us. We thought we were hot shit.
About six months after starting the warehouse job, I got sick of it and quit. My parents did not approve of me selling weed, so I had to move out.
In the Spring of ‘09, I moved into a duplex with my buddies James and Brian.
They would go to work in the morning, and I would ride around and sell weed.
One day, we went to re-up with our main dealer, Shawn. He was running low and didn’t have the full amount of weed that we wanted. He offered us something different.
He lived in a rough part of town. We pulled up behind his car on a quiet side street. He got out and hopped into my car.
“How we doin', boys?” He said to us as he climbed into the back seat.
“Doin’ alright,” said Travis.
“You wanted a half, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, well, I can do a quarter today, and I can cut you a deal on some oxys.”
“How much?” I asked.
“If you buy ten or more, I can do fifty a pop.”
I didn’t know much about OxyContin. I knew a couple people who used it though. I looked at Travis, he nodded and shrugged, I nodded back.
“Alright, we’ll take ten,” said Travis.
We had no idea what we were doing. We hoped that $50 a pill was a good deal.
It turned out we could sell them for $80. Not a bad markup.
It was a lot easier than selling weed. The people who wanted it really wanted it. It worked for a month or two. One day, a friend's brother named Ryan came over and bought a few. He sat down on the couch. I was in a recliner. I handed him the pills in a cigarette cellophane, he handed me the money.
“You mind if I do one here?” He asked.
“Fine with me,” I said.
He pulled out one of the pills and stuck it in his mouth to remove the slow-release coating. Then he set it on the coffee table on a Sports Illustrated magazine and crushed it up with a Bic lighter, put it into lines with his drivers license, and snorted them with a twenty-dollar bill.
Shortly after, I started using the pills myself. I would crush them up and snort them, just like I’d seen Ryan do. My problems would melt away for a little while.
The problem was, I was getting high on my own supply. I started doing more and more, and pretty soon, I was losing money instead of making money.
It was getting difficult for us to find weed. Shawn didn’t have any, and our backups didn’t either. It was a “drought.” This would happen from time to time, but this was a bad one. The money stopped flowing, bills were due, clients were turning elsewhere.
Travis’s brother claimed to have some. I gave Travis $1,000 one day, and he came back with no weed and no money. Now all my money was gone and with it my means of making more.
This was payback for the 100 Ecstasy pills that Travis lost to the police two years earlier. His brother had fronted them to him. To this day, I’m not sure if Travis knew what was going to happen or not.
Now I had no money, no weed, no oxy, and no job. I was in a bad place. I needed to find something to do. I was pissed off at Travis. I got robbed by his brother for something I had nothing to do with. I was with him the night he got caught, but I was not involved with the pills.
I felt like Travis had robbed me. We almost came to blows over it one day.
I’m not sure exactly how it started, but we began robbing people. We didn’t have any money, so fuck it, we started robbing. We had to eat too.
Usually, we would meet someone who wanted to buy a bunch of weed. We’d have them pick one of us up and take us to the apartment complex where “our dealer” lived. The other one would go to the back parking lot and wait.
We’d get the money and walk through apartments to the back lot and drive off into the sunset. We would usually get some angry phone calls and text messages and threats for the next few days.
We were back in business, but it wasn’t the same. Before, we had started with a handshake and $200 and turned it into a business. Now, we were robbing people. Between me doing oxy and Travis having an addiction to shoes and clothes, the money did not last.
We had enough money to buy a quarter pound, so I called up an old friend named Ben who was selling pounds of weed. He was more of a friend of a friend. We never got along great. I called him two times. He didn’t pick up. The third time he answered.
“Hello.”
“Yo. It’s Sam J. What’s good?”
“Not much. I just got off work. I’m making a run right now.”
“I need a cutie. Can you help me?”
“Not today.” Click.
He hung up on me.
For whatever reason, he was giving me the run around. He kept making excuses. I called him one last time.”
“Yeah?” That's how he answered the phone.
“What’s going on, man?” I said.
“Nothing, dude. I’m not gonna sell to you, alright. Stop calling me.”
Maybe he got wind that we had been robbing people. We weren’t planning to rob him. But I got angry. It was another drought, and he was the only one we knew who had anything.
“Alright, Ben. I’m going to rob you.” Click.
I hung up on him this time.
I told him I was going to rob him, and a little while later, I tried.
If you’re feeling generous:
Thank you for reading!
Enjoy the rest of your day.
-Sam
So real I can see it 🙈
Great follow up man. Can't wait for part 3 and seeing it come together.